What now?

After I did Rhapsody at Dumbarton in 2006, I pretty quickly packed up and moved to the Highlands of Scotland. There were lots of reasons for doing this, climbing being just one. The ‘climbing reason’ was largely to find the most adventurous, arduous new routes I could lay my hands on, and try and do them. To Hell and Back, Echo Wall and more recently The Usual Suspects. All climbs where the actual climbing is only a small part of the deal. I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time walking into Scottish coires in the rain with three ropes and two racks in my bag. I buy cleaning brushes in packs of 24. I’ve given myself three overuse injuries from cleaning new routes. On The Usual Suspects I think I spent 10 days on the rope on Sron Ulladale with my rockshoes just dangling from my harness before I finished finding, rigging and cleaning it and could actually start to move on it.

I’ve been doing first ascents for 12 years now and still I love it. Not in a count ‘em up ticking kind of way. It’s the creative expression of every stage of the process that I’ve enjoyed so far. Over the past few years I’ve really revelled in the inaccessibility, the awkwardness and the pure endurance factor of time and effort needed to open new routes on trad gear in the remotest possible places.

But climbing never has been about one channel for me. When judging the value of experiences, people often refer to how ‘memorable’ they were. This makes sense. I was reading Steve McClure’s column in Climb today and he was talking about how he found his long redpoint battles most memorable for him. I feel exactly the same. For me also, there is no substitute for the detail, the intricacy of the moves and the tactics and the totally enveloping focus of the redpoint effort, with all extraneous thought and movement distilled out by a thousand rehearsals in body and mind. Every bit of time, effort, sweat and will that goes into it, all add to it’s value.

I don’t think my memory of the smell and the summer sun on Echo Wall sessions will ever diminish. Or glissading down Observatory gully at 11pm in the sunset feeling totally at home. Or the roaring wind throwing me about on Sron Uladail, ropes rubbing on sharp edges, soaked to the skin as I looked for lines to climb. Mountains and mountain trad climbing inevitably make a deep stamp in your memory by their power. So is that an argument to forget everything else and go trad climbing all the time? No!

Memories are important, but they are not everything. We have to live in the moment too. Everyday needs and pleasures are also important. You might not remember your regular walk to your girlfriend’s or school or work on a particular day several years ago. But the everyday act of walking is something really important to lots of us. To say you’d soon miss it if it was taken away from you is a bit of an understatement. 

This everyday routine of climbing movement is the other side of climbing for me, and I know it is for lots of people, even if they don’t necessarily think of it that way. Whether it’s the exercise, or the emptying of the mind for a while, or the movement or whatever - it doesn’t matter. If you look at it directly it seems mundane. But the bigger picture shows that it becomes important to you. Especially if, like me, you’ve done it for 17 years.

I often feel like this in September. A long ‘summer’ of labour intensive mountain new routing leaves me counting the hours of being wet, walking with large sacks, shivering and hauling about on ropes and realising this comes at the expense of actual metres of hard moves climbed. This season, like all the previous, I have some fine adventures to show for it. If the last warm days, dry mountain crags and partners collide, I may yet have more. Now though, the pendulum needs to swing the other way and I need to climb some hard moves again. 

Short term plan: time to boulder

Things coming up

I’ve just written an article discussing in a bit more depth my psychological preparation for Echo Wall on PlanetMountain.com here.

I’ve got some lectures coming up in these places:

Dublin this Thursday, 28th January

EICA Ratho 4th February - masterclasses during the day and a lecture in the evening.

Fort William Mountain Festival Sunday Feb 14th - talking about the Marshall/Smith week re-enactment.

Llanberis LLAMF March 6th lecture and masterclasses the following day.

Details of all those lecture on my lectures page as always.

Claire wins Best Director at BAFTA Scotland

Last night we were in Glasgow for the BAFTA Scotland new talent awards ceremony. Claire was nominated a few weeks ago for Best Director with Echo Wall. Claire was chuffed to bits to get the nomination and both of us were really happy to see a film from the small world of climbing making it into the glam limelight of the mainstream film and television industry.

But we both convinced ourselves totally that this would be as far as it went, and that the other three nominees for Best Director, with an obviously closer involvement in the film industry would have a better chance. 

I sat with Claire while she was briefed along with the other nominees (including the likes of Limmy) about which red carpet to walk down if their name was called out to come and receive an award. I thought it was nice to be invited to spend an evening in such company and see one of these ceremonies ‘in the flesh’. Loud music was played, presenters cracked jokes and announced winners. There was punching the air, shaky hands and tears from winners, and whoops and rapturous applause from a packed grand hall.

Claire’s Echo Wall was up against the directors of the thriller The Dead Outside, urban drama Running in Traffic and the documentary Ballads of the Book featuring contributions from Ian Rankin. We watched the nominees clips play including Echo Wall and then the presenter opened an envelope and announced the winner was Claire MacLeod. 

Claire’s face was indeed a picture. 

Neither of us can still believe that Claire won this award. The feedback we had from BAFTA’s jurors was that apart from the practical challenge of shooting a film like this single handedly and the seriousness of what Claire filmed (her other half risking neck), they liked the personal nature of the film and the appreciation shown of the beauty of the Lochaber in the shooting.

The impact of it in the ‘outside world’ of film was summed up by one of the other nominees. He asked Claire about the clip that played from Echo Wall of me saying:

“If I make a mistake on the climb, the consequences could not be higher for me, or for Claire.”

He asked if I was meaning we’d have to re-shoot the whole climb if I failed.

Claire explained, “No, he was meaning he would hit the ground and die with his wife filming if he made a mistake.”

This week, Echo Wall also won the Best Scottish Film award at the Fort William Mountain Festival, and Best Film at Glasgow Mountain Film Festival.

Claire nominated for a Bafta!

I got home the other day to find Claire on the phone looking very cheery. Turns out it was Bafta Scotland on the phone saying she had been nominated for best director in the Bafta new talent awards for Echo Wall. Both of us were fairly dumfounded by this news to say the least.

It’s brilliant though that the quality and commitment of Claire’s work on Echo Wall has been recognised at such a high level. Claire has been creative all the time I’ve known her. But with Echo Wall she did what most others wouldn’t manage, she took it to another level by shooting footage that was extremely arduous and ultimately frightening to get, not to mention a year of long days and nights of work and all our savings and earnings to turn it into a finished film. I’m really pleased for her.

So next month the kilt will be coming out for the Bafta ceremony in Glasgow!

Echo Wall observations

I’ve talked a bit recently about my experiment in not giving my hardest route, Echo Wall a grade.

I was interested last year to see if the UK’s climbing magazines would report the ascent of Echo Wall, as they do for almost all routes that break a new level of difficulty. I expected them not to since I didn’t grade it. I predicted that saying it was the hardest thing I’d done wouldn’t be enough.

I thought my prediction had been borne out but Climber magazine actually reported on the route for the first time last month with this entry:

“Enraged at the Sassenachs’ incursion over the border and climbing his routes, Dave MacLeod dons his kilt, retreats to the mountains and climbs Echo Wall on Ben Nevis. Tired of the media hype, he doesn’t give it a grade in an attempt to dissuade sponsored heroes from repeating it. Fat chance of that because the Sassenachs hear it’s more that fifteen minutes from the road and go to the Climbing Works instead. MacLeod comments, “I don’t know what to grade it, but it’s definitely harder than problem three in Fort William Climbing Wall”

Quality

The Walk of Life video

Here is a montage from climbing the Walk of Life. There was just the two of us there, so the footage of the lead was shot "press and go" from the tripod on the beach while Claire belayed, but it's funny to see it started raining halfway up!



Some of you will recognise the track 'Stoater' from Echo Wall, by Katy MacLeod. Incidentally, the full list of music featured in the Echo Wall film is on the Rare Breed website here.

Awards for Echo Wall!

The premiere of Echo Wall passed in a blur for Claire and I on Sunday, with our first ever film picking up two awards, for Best Climbing Film and Best Film at the Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival. It was very overwhelming to sit with 500 of you and watch the film we've worked night and day on flat out since the end of July.

Our feet still haven't touched the ground as I left Glasgow early the next morning for lectures in England and Claire has been busy sending out all our pre-orders of the DVD from Fort William. Thanks to everyone who ordered their copy in advance - I hope you enjoy the film!

If you would like to order a copy, you can get one here. Maybe I'll catch some of you in Preston on Friday night, Cotswolds at 7.

Echo Wall DVD - the full route list

A lot of folk have been asking us which other routes are on the Echo Wall DVD. Here is the full list:

Bouldering

Bear Trap Prow V12

Frontal System V12

Saturn Crack V9

Big Long Now V13

All these problems are in Glen Nevis

Winter mixed

Don’t Die of Ignorance XI,11 Ben Nevis

Trad

Echo Wall

Sublime E8 6c, Glen Coe

Jahu E6 6a (solo), Glen Nevis

Sweet Little Mystery E4 6a (Kev Shields soloing), Glen Nevis

Sport climbing

Darwin Dixit 8c (solo)

Los Ultimo Hippies 8c

Alzheimer Bros 8b+

Malapel 8b

Sativa Patatica 8a flash

All of those are in Margalef, Spain

We’ve also been getting asked about wholesale of the Echo Wall DVD for those of you that run your own shops. For wholesale copies, just get in touch and we’ll give you the lowdown.

Echo Wall premiere is nearly sold out

The Edinburgh Mountain Film Festival have just reported that Alien Rock have about 20 tickets left, with a few more at Tiso for the sunday night session which includes the premiere of Echo Wall. Better get on that phone. If you miss out, we are sending out the pre-ordered DVDs right after the premiere. You can get your order in here.

Should be a good night, see y'all there.

It had to go...

Sometimes you need to make sacrifices, to meet your goals in life. This means some hard choices. But you know deep down when it’s the right thing to do.

Echo Wall review - Stone Country

Stone Country Press have reviewed the Echo Wall DVD here

We have just heard from our manufacturers that the DVDs should still be with us in time for the Premiere at EMFF on Sunday 19th. I hear from EMFF that the majority of the tickets for the premiere night have sold, so if you want to be there, get a ticket asap. If you can't make it to that we'll be posting out all our pre-orders as soon as the DVDs arrive.

Echo Wall falling rocks clip

Here is another wee clip of soloing about on some right choss to get back to the top of Echo Wall and dislodging a couple of hefty rocks. Ouch!

Jimmy Marshall interview

As part of our film about Echo Wall we really hoped to get an interview with the ice climbing legend Jimmy Marshall, who was perhaps the finest ice climber ever in the step cutting generation which ended during the late 1960's when people started using two ice axes and frontpoint crampons to climb ice. 

Jimmy is famously reluctant to give interviews so we were extremely lucky that he agreed to give us an hour of his time to share stories and thoughts on climbing on Ben Nevis. Some of these are in our Echo Wall film as well as an extended edit of the interview in the DVD extras. Here is a short teaser from that, where Jimmy describes a massive factor 2 fall while attempting a new winter route on the Ben in the 60's. Brilliant!

Climb Magazine review Echo Wall

Neil Pearsons, editor of Climb Magazine has posted up the first review of the Echo Wall film on his site here.

“...Echo Wall on Ben Nevis is essential viewing for anyone interested not only in the physical and mental aspects of climbing a hard bold traditional route, but also how it has to dominate the climber’s life to become a reality.”

The full review is here.

The grade of Echo Wall

Shaking out before the final crux on Echo Wall (video still)

It’s been an interesting experiment, climbing the hardest route of my life but not giving it a grade. Contrary to what some people seem to be thinking, this was not to make any particular point, merely because I didn’t know what to grade it. That said, it always irritated me that the grades of my routes or repeats ended up at the centre of the discussion, rather that at the fringe where they belong. I have noticed people even referring to my climb Rhapsody as ‘E11’ as if that were it’s name rather than an insignificant and rather meaningless number attached to it.

Part of the reason writing this blog is useful is that I can answer question folk commonly ask and hopefully steer the chat back towards what’s important - the climbing - and away from grading (ha! he says, optimistically). Anyway, perhaps some more details will help folk get on with pigeon holing a beautiful climb into a ill fitting picture.

Right now, I still have no idea what to grade Echo Wall, so I’m not going to at the moment. Perhaps at some point I’ll have repeated some more routes given E grades in double figures and have a better idea. Grades evolve. With few references to go on, they are pretty shaky. Once there are more routes and more climber’s opinions on them, they become a bit more useful. Echo Wall is much harder than any trad route I’ve ever done or tried, thats all I know right now.

Quite apart from the line and the mountain, I was really inspired by making a route that had the combination of 8c or harder climbing, an uncompromising level of seriousness (which, if you need it spelled out, means you would die if you fell off it), and a remoteness of situation that would create a logistical challenge of actually working on the climb. Echo Wall was perfect in this respect. None of the Ben’s hardest routes to date have had high standard physical climbing. Why? Because it’s just not practical. It’s covered in snow, rain, mist, lichen or moss 99.9% of the time. Go to somewhere like the lakes and you’ll get nice weather, nice chilled approaches and pretty small and convenient crags. When I first began to think about trying Echo Wall, I figured I would be able to absorb this hurdle and that the climbing would be the main problem. The climbing challenge was be to be able to climb 9a at the same time as spending lots of time in the mountains to have a realistic chance of linking Echo Wall on a top rope. As it turned out, this was the easy bit!

My headache here is how should this be reflected in the grade? We have trad routes given big grades like E9 or E10 that are completely piss on a toprope (like 8a+ or easier) but their grades stand the test of repeats because of either seriousness or mountain situation (often stretched quite a bit!). I actually agree that proper mountain trad routes should have some recognition of their remoteness and awkwardness reflected in the grade. Echo Wall feels like 8c/+ on a top rope, with the real prospect of death from the redpoint crux, on a crag with more logisitcal issues than any other mountain crag in the UK.

Do you see my problem? I am uncomfortable with the feeling of grades advancing too quickly due to overgrading, but on the other hand feel that Echo Wall might well earn a laughable quanta of E points over anything else I’ve done, based on the way the E scale has been used traditionally over the past couple of decades. I just don’t know.

Grades will always be very shaky and mobile at the cutting edge, but it would be a shame for these grades to lose any credibility they did have just because the standard going through a period of rise. On the other hand, if you really believe a route is a certain grade, it’s important to just be straight up and make the proposal. James Pearson has just done this with a stunning looking new line in Devon. An inspired piece of work from one of the world’s top climbers in the trad and bouldering disciplines right now. And top effort for sticking his neck out and pinning the E12 grade to a climb for the first time.

So what is the solution to all this uncertainty? Like most hard truths, you knew it already - time and repeat ascents. It will take climbers to drag themselves to these corners of our isles and make the time to get these things repeated. Until then, comparison between them is a fools errand.

For that reason, Echo Wall is ungraded, for now. It doesn’t matter, because the interesting part is the story of the ascent, and I’ve not been nearly so cautious in making sure it can be heard!

Even more stats, if you are into number crunching:

Echo Wall took me longer to link on a top rope than A’ Muerte 9a, i.e. Many days, while in Spain I was able to consistently climb 8b+ and 8c in a day.

Echo Wall is 8a+ up to the roof at 12m, with the smallest BD micro cam for gear. This section is comparable with If Six Was Nine E9 in the Lakes. At the roof I could get about 40 seconds rest out of the kneebar.

After the roof is the technical crux. There are three bits of gear protecting this - a poor Camalot in a very shallow slot, a good wire but in a suspect tooth of rock and wire in dubious rock. It’s dubious because there used to be another wire placement right beside it which was the best of the lot, but the placement broke and fell off randomly in between my visits. Scary!

Right after the crux there is an RP3, quite good but blindly placed. Then a runout to a shakeout.

The shakeout isn’t so good, and afterwards there is final hard section and this is where I fell many times when trying to link it. There is an RP and very poor skyhook at the shakeout, but the placement is in a loose flake of rock so I’m pretty sure they would just pull right through if you fell here. You have to do the final boulder problem pumped, knowing if you fall you will die.

Echo Wall trailer

Here is a trailer for the Echo Wall film. We are expecting the DVD in late October (I hesitate to say an exact date!!) but if you would like to get your copy in, you can pre-order it from the shop now.

Big Long Now

Exit problem, Big Long Now, Sky Pilot (video still from Echo Wall)

Usually a couple of times a year I start a post by saying sorry to you guys for not posting in a while. The volume of work on the Echo Wall film has made it impossible though over the past couple of weeks. But here I am, in the car with Claire on the way to Glasgow to hand over the finished tapes to the DVD manufacturers. Woohoo! Well, we ain’t relaxing just yet until we get many large boxes of DVD in our living room in a couple of weeks time.

We are happy with our film though, and all the extras to go on the DVD - Spanish sport climbing, Glen Nevis soloing and bouldering and an extended interview with the climbing legend Jimmy Marshall. After we get back from Glasgow we’ll be sorting out a trailer for you to see what all the fuss is about some time next week, and you’ll even be able to pre-order a copy of the film from the shop shortly too.

In amongst the craziness of putting the finishing touches to the film and lectures in different cities in Scotland, I have made time to sneak out for some local climbing sessions. Climbing is so utterly relaxing for me, that even after back to back 18 hour days editing for many days, just getting out into the glen and running up to Sky Pilot for a session makes me feel fresh.

And much fitter than I expected given lack of sleep. The resilience of the body is quite an amazing thing really. In my last post I was getting excited as I was really close to the monster traverse of Sky Pilot. Constant wet weather was getting in the way, but sessions in poor conditions were excellent training. At one point I was resorting to blasting along the first part with a towel scarf and drying the soaking holds as I went. It didn’t really work.

Back with Kev on Sunday i got through the crux for the first time but a great big slug sliming over the crucial foothold needed to be removed with a gentle nudge of the toe, which destroyed my reserve on the last couple of moves (you’ll see in the film).

Big Long Now, the ‘barrel’ section, about 25 metres in, 25 metres to go! (video still from Echo Wall)

But the ‘September High’ was on the way. Five days of dry weather was the final piece of the puzzle. Last night (friday) I sprinted up after getting home from my lecture and pretty much knew it was ‘on’. First time out I lost my concentration with the anticipation of doing it and fumbled the crux. Next time I was more relaxed and got through to the kneebar with a margin to spare.

Ten minutes is a long, long time to feel the suspense about the last traversing section and the exit problem. Especially when hanging upside down from your knee. Yeah, you ‘should’ do it if you get there, but it takes a fair bit of composure not to let the anticipation get to you. That is the great thing about endurance climbing. I love that!

I didn’t need to worry too much, this was definitely my moment to nail this project, and I topped out with just a gentle pump in my arms. Brilliant. The massive 50 metre horizontal trip across the crag is now ‘Big Long Now’ and Font 8bish although a highly unusual one and quite hard to grade. Certainly the hardest link I’ve done on rock anyway. But it’s hard to know if I’m just rubbish at this type of climbing?? I see some of my problems at Dumbarton are receiving some upgrades with repeats. Perhaps this could be harder than V13? It’s certainly much harder than A Muerte at 9a which would make it V14. I lose track to be honest. Anyway the vid of it will be in Echo Wall so you can see for yourself its the brilliant climbing that stands out here. Because this was my endurance training project for Echo Wall it’s a nice feeling of completeness to finish it for it’s own sake and also in time to make it into the film.

Perfecto timing - now I can get to work on the more conventional straight up projects just in time for the good autumn conditions. Bring it on (but don’t worry i will have a trailer done for y’all during the week). More video still of Echo Wall on Claire's blog here.

Wake up & smell the coffee part 1

Getting Echo Wall ready for it’s test screening at Fort William bouldering wall last week kept us up until some silly hours last week. But we got there. The screening got us pretty excited but also gave us a long list of tweaks to make over the coming couple of weeks. Thanks so much to everyone that came and for the great encouragement and feedback. By the way, the recipe for Claire’s gingerbread is here. So far it's powered the current hardest climb in Scotland in bouldering, mixed climbing, sport climbing and trad climbing. The ultimate sports fuel? Let me tell you this pattern ain't no accident.

After three and a half weeks of no training to work on the film I couldn’t handle it any more and went on an eight day training bender, cutting the editing down to 12 hours a day to make room. It felt so good! Everything hurts right now. Some sleep would help, but in some ways I think the rest has done me some good. My body feels quite strong right now if a bit heavy – ready for some bouldering. On a visit to Glasgow I stopped by at Dumbarton and Glasgow climbing wall for a couple of references and 1-5-8 on Glasgow’s campus board was feeling pretty easy. I had been getting the fear because I have yet to succeed on 1-4-7 on Fort William’s board, but it seems that I can happily blame the desperate board, rather than weakness in this instance. A rested body with a good base of strength is a good base to build on.

A video still of Don’t Die of Ignorance XI,11 from the Echo Wall film I’ve been editing this week.

I have three major boulder projects in the Glen for my local winter projects. A V13 and two V14s. Right now the conditions are perfect to work on these. But work is in the way. Work is always in the way.

This is something I struggle with constantly. I should do less work, but I keep doing more. Learn the word NO Dave goddammit!! The trouble is that work is too damn interesting a lot of the time. The work I did over the past two years allowed me the opportunity to have a spring and summer with much climbing on Echo Wall and to save up enough to make the purchases necessary to make a film about it. That’s pretty cool. But where do I stop? As always with work, new work creates new directions and openings. So which ones to close in order to stay focused?

Right now I am on the verge of total lack of focus and a bit of an implosion. Perhaps a symptom of having completed Echo Wall and not taken time to sit back and take some decisions about what to do next.

Anyway, enough moaning. Hugh reckons:

It’s all good. My moan is simply about the lack of hours in the day to fit in all the good things. I can honestly say I have not felt bored for a single second for at least the last eight years. But enough of being so knackered all the time I can’t enjoy all this stuff properly.

This is a wake up and smell the coffee time for me. Some stuff needs to change. First step, I’m off for some zzzzzzs.

Addictions, Aversions

Bank of Scotland arête, Nairn High Street

It’s been another week of ups and downs working on our film of Echo Wall. We were most definitely in need of a break from the screen by Friday. It was Claire’s birthday so we headed for Tilda Swinton’s very retro cool film festival in Nairn. Just being outside the house was so brilliant. I got really excited to be out travelling around Scotland after so long indoors. On our return I managed two brief escapes to Sky Pilot to claw back the fitness, throwing myself on the problems like no tomorrow.

The film inches closer to a final cut. Most exciting! We’ve certainly chosen the right moment to be editing a film. The Lochaber monsoon has been impressive as usual, but excelling even itself for August.

As always, I’ve been learning lots from the whole experience of doing Echo Wall, even though the route itself is done. I was expecting to feel, and did indeed feel a massive sense of nothingness after doing the route. After so long aligning yourself to one goal, it’s suddenly gone and you are left with no focus until something replaces it.

That’s nice because it reminded me just how much I like the simple act of climbing, solving climbing problems being outside. A massive reminder has been of my need (or addiction) to exercise. I’m not sure if it’s exercise or rock movement or whether they can be separated at all. But either way, it’s real! I’ve been in total withdrawal these last two weeks, literally climbing the walls in the house. This is a happy addiction. If it dies before I do, I’ll be extremely surprised.

I’ve been reading a lot too about approaches to risk, and satisfaction from things like sport. Partly for my own sake and partly to help me distill my ideas to communicate in our film.

Three general traits of human nature, demonstrated in research, but obvious and tangible to ourselves only in moments of clarity, usually after a highly emotive experience, stand out for me.

The first is our aversion to loss. People hate to lose things more than they take pleasure in gains of a higher magnitude. A gift of an amount of money affects our mood far less than the stress caused by losing an equivalent amount. This aversion to loss progresses to a default position of unreasonable aversion to risk when coupled with a second trait. We aren’t very good at visualising probabilities and usually end up stressing far too much about remote possibilities while distracted from the really important stuff. We worry more about small chances of injury, public failure etc than we do about the rewards and satisfaction of going for something good.

The third is our rather poor ability to forecast our own feelings down the line. In general, we place way too much importance on immediate gratification, at the expense of suffering short term discomfort for a much larger windfall of satisfaction later. This has the secondary problem of us not giving enough weight to things that will make us happier for longer, but forecasting in error that sources of immediate happiness will last much longer than they actually do.

Avoiding these natural pitfalls is a tough job, requiring constant attention. But awareness of their constant pervasive influence at least allows the opportunity to stay above them.

More on this later

From one extreme to the other

Over the past two weeks I have done a good job of replacing climbaholism with workaholism. It’s funny how things fit together nicely. August just happens to be the worst month for climbing in Scotland (often too wet in the mountains and getting colder, but still warm and midgy in the glens) and this August as been something of a monsoon. It was a good decision to grab my chance on Echo Wall when I did. If I hadn’t it would have been next year for sure. 

Is this workaholism healthy? Definitely not. A week straight of 4/5am finishes makes one’s edges a little frayed. But it has it’s uses. and in the very short term can be a good idea. After setting up our production company to make the film about Echo Wall and working with Claire on some editing, I headed back up the Ben as soon as the clouds broke to film a bit of running and nice footage of the mountain.

Bill Murray said “ No man will ever know Ben Nevis” When I was climbing Echo Wall I did feel like I did have a small window, a partial insight into understanding how to move well on this mountain, just for a second. But the feeling, illusionary or not, soon wore off. Arms and legs are hurting once again from the climbing and running efforts - a good feeling.

Time in the computer chair can be deadening for both mind and body at times, but so long as the connection to climbing isn’t allowed to become too distant, it can strengthen the motivation.

I always forget just how much I love rock movement until I have enforced time away. This is great for me. After 15 years of rock climbing, to still feel the psyche to be on the rock stronger than ever makes me so excited and full of energy to start new projects, whatever they might be???

Right now I’m in the car with Claire on our way to meet with Jimmy Marshall and talk about Ben Nevis climbing. You’ll see it in the film.